Telephone users, when contacting an organisation, especially via a call centre, are often frustrated by finding that for numerous reasons they cannot complete a transaction in one session. Either the user needs to phone the call centre again with more information or the call centre promises to call back but fails to do so. Either way, the user has to make a further telephone call to the call centre to follow up the transaction and often has to negotiate a second time a sequence of spoken menus each requiring a keyed (DTMF) input to reach the right department and then has to explain afresh the status of the earlier enquiry.
It is known for a call centre to receive a customer's calling line identifier (CLI) and to use it to determine which agent station an incoming call is to be routed to (U.S. Pat. No. 4,987,587; U.S. Pat. No. 5,537,470 specifically for a disconnected caller; WO2004/054209).
It is also known for a call centre to receive a customer identity via user input and to use it to determine which agent station an incoming call is to be routed to (U.S. Pat. No. 4,932,021; U.S. Pat. No. 5,537,470 (telephone credit card no. as identifier)).
It is known for a call centre to receive a customer's CLI and to use it to retrieve customer data (U.S. Pat. No. 6,327,359).
In click-dial systems where a user clicks a button on a web page to set up a phone call to the call centre, it is known to prompt the user to enter data such as account number, phone number etc. (U.S. Pat. No. 6,792,102: also the web server records the identity of agent participating in a web session so that phone call can be routed to the same agent).
The present invention is defined in the claims.